Why Humans (and Futurists!) Are So Bad At Seeing The Future

In his column for WIRED, writer Paul Ford turns his attention to the art of predictions and the future by reconsidering the predictions published by a group of future thinkers back in 1980. He writes, "all the predictions are wrong ... [but] when you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong ... they're just saggy middle-aged predictions." The predictions themselves revealed something fascinating about the mind of the predictor. Progress, writes Ford, is therefore "individual, personal and in the eye of the beholder."

The piece, as you might expect, made me wonder whether my own predictions in Non-Obvious Megatrends may age poorly themselves when examined by a future reader. Yet his conclusion did give me hope: "What I took away from The Book of Predictions, forty years later, is to watch for the curious and interesting intersections between very large things." The search for intersections is at the heart of Non-Obvious Megatrends and my predictions. Does this mean they will stand the test of time? I really don't know. But by 2060, I'll just consider myself lucky if I'm still around to read someone's future critique of them. By then I'll definitely be saggy and well beyond middle-aged anyway.